Incurable idealists who are entrusted with power will surely disappoint, as in the case of Woodrow Wilson. His radical theory of one world government still resonates with the international socialists today, though perpetual warfare to somehow ensure lasting peace continues unabated.

“Georges Clemenceau was born in 1841 [and]…had journeyed far in those seventy-eight years, from the extreme Left to what was almost the extreme Right, and the old radical barnstormer, anti-clerical, and Dreyfusard was now, as he stood in this room handing the thick book to the German, a personification of national patriotism. The Germans had made him so.

His powers of sarcasm, vituperation and assault were almost without equal in his time, and with these powers he could castigate and finally sweep away the governments which showed any hesitation; for we are in a war to the death, he kept on saying, and we must win. Thus he became Father Victory to millions of French soldiers in 1918 and went into the peace conference with a personal authority none could question. The Tiger – Father of Victory.

Now, as he stood beetling at the Prussian aristocrat, beetling and growling and showing his fangs, the Tiger was so formed or transformed by the events in which he had played a great part that all memory of the international socialist had faded away, leaving a kind of quintessential residue of the purest nationalism.

Moltke, Hindenburg, Ludendorff and the Kaiser Wilhelm II produced this result, willy-nilly, just as the Tiger himself (along with Poincare and others whom he equally disliked) was to assist mightily in the production of Adolf Hitler.

[What] Clemenceau [wanted from the Versailles Treaty was] that Germany could be kept permanently subjugated. What Woodrow Wilson hoped was for something still different. He hoped that the whole world, in all its infinite diversity of races, religions and social organization, could be brought into a parliament of mankind so as to discuss and compose the differences that lead to war.

Wilson was wholly unprepared for the extent and complications of the passionate nationalisms his various groups of principles had fanned into flames. As he had never understood the Mexican Revolution, so he does not seem to have understood the whole exhausting tangle of racial and national repulsions in Central and Southern Europe, to which his own political philosophy had helped give such fierce ne vitality.”

(This House Against This House (excerpts), Vincent Sheean, Random House, 1945, pp. 7-16)